For many years, medical personnel have used freestanding and bed-mounted poles which have hooks to support intravenous (IV) equipment. As to bed-mounted poles, it has been common to provide an arrangement which permits the pole to be moved from an upright position to a position extending horizontally along the side of the bed, so that when the pole is not needed it is conveniently out of the way. In order to facilitate storage of the pole, as well as to permit adjustment of its height during use, two-section poles have typically been used in which one section telescopes within the other.
Although arrangements of this type have generally been satisfactory for their intended purposes, one problem which has been encountered is that, when the pole is in its storage position extending horizontally along the side of the bed, the hooks of the pole have a tendency to snag the clothing of persons standing near the bed or to snag objects passing near a mobile bed as the mobile bed is moved.
There has been a trend to provide mobile beds with mechanisms on each side which facilitate lateral patient transfers between the mobile bed and other beds, as a result of which there is less physical room for an IV pole to be horizontally stored along the side of the bed, and it can be difficult to move the IV pole to or from its storage position when the patient transfer mechanism is in an operational configuration. Therefore, there has been a recent trend toward an arrangement in which the pole extends transversely at the end of the bed when it is in its storage position. Since a collapsed two-stage pole is typically longer than the width of the bed, this has necessitated the use of a three-stage IV pole having three telescoping sections. The hooks on these poles also have a tendency to snag clothing and objects, and in addition a further problem has developed.
More specifically, three-stage poles typically have a first locking mechanism which can releasably prevent relative lengthwise movement between the two lower pole sections and a second locking mechanism which can releasably prevent relative lengthwise movement between two upper pole sections, and a common and convenient way of actuating and deactuating the locking mechanisms is to provide a manually rotatable actuator. When attempting to tighten or release the rotatable actuator for the second (upper) locking mechanism, the middle pole section will rotate with the actuator if the actuator for the first (lower) locking mechanism is not tightened sufficiently to ensure that the middle pole section does not rotate relative to the lower pole section, which of course means that the second locking mechanism cannot be released or adequately tightened. Difficulties of this type are undesirable, particularly in medical emergency situations.
Accordingly, one object of the present invention is to provide an arrangement in which, when an IV pole is in a storage position, each hook of the pole is shielded so that the hook cannot snag clothing or other objects.
A further object is to provide a three-stage IV pole in which a rotatable actuator for the middle and upper sections can be actuated and released without any rotation of the middle section of the pole.